Before cell phones essay

: if your name and social network track you around the virtual world beyond Facebook, youll have to restrain yourself and so will everyone else. In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called Mark Zuckerberg. Manicured eyebrows, sweaty forehead, and that coked-up, wafer-thin self- confidence, always threatening to collapse into paranoia. In the scheme of things its a parking ticket were offered a Zuckerberg slumped before his laptop, still obsessed with the long-lost Erica, sending a Friend request to her on Facebook, and then refreshing the page, over and over, in expectation of her reply. Hollywood still believes that behind every mogul theres an idée fixe: Rosebudmeet Erica. We shouldnt seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. You know whats cool? You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Are these really his motivations, his obsessions? Connection is the goal. The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the Why of Facebook.

Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.) But here I fear I am becoming nostalgic. Whats the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual? E Pluribus Unumthats the point. Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and Rooney Mara as his girlfriend Erica. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesnt matter who you are, as long as you make choices (which means, finally, purchases). But the pack mentality is precisely what Open Graph, a Facebook innovation of 2008, is designed to encourage. Heres my guess: he wants to be like everybody else. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebookif and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at largethis money thinks of us the other way around. Poking, because thats what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk.